Life with George Putnam
Dorothy and George arrived in Bend, Oregon in February 1912 a honeymoon that had taken them to New York, Central America, San Francisco, and Portland. Their new house, Pinelyn, was 2800 square feet, cost more than $4000 to build, and by 1913 had an added tennis court. The house, now known as the George Palmer and Dorothy Binney Putnam House, is located in the Drake Park Neighborhood Historic District and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. While they lived in Bend, George Putnam sold lots on the Bend riverfront and named the resulting road Dohema Road after the three Binney sisters: Dorothy, Helen, Mary.
Dorothy established the home as a social gathering place in Bend, and threw parties with music, dancing, and skits; she founded the local Glee club and raised funds for people undergoing cancer care. She was known for her work in the suffrage movement and encouraging other women to help pass the laws needed to allow women the right to vote.
On December 3, 1912, she cast her vote in Oregon, the second woman allowed to do so after the Governor's wife had cast the first vote. She gave birth to her first child, David Binney Putnam, on May 20, 1913. They remained in Bend until 1914 when they moved to Salem, Oregon while her husband George was secretary to James Withycombe. In 1916, they moved to Washington D.C. where Dorothy was involved in the war effort.
She had been trained at Mount Holyoke College in a class related to work needs during wartime, and ended up leading nine hundred people in the United States' Inspection Division at the end of World War I. Dorothy and George then moved to Rye, New York, where they built a house without blueprints which included a jungle-themed guest room painted by the artist Isabel Cooper. Her second child, George Palmer Putnam, was born May 9, 1921.
They sold the Oregon house to M. W. Wagner in 1919, the same year that George Putnam published his book The Smiting of the Rock which is about Oregon and has a character based on Dorothy.
